


Crawling Beast

by Thimblerig



Category: Good Omens (TV), Historical RPF
Genre: Banter, F/F, Flirting, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Genderfluid Character, Genderfluid Crowley, I tried to make it gentle and sweet, Poetry, The Character Death is an inevitable result of a mortal and immortal staying together, fluff and feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-30 22:50:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21435994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: Again love, the limb-loosener, rattles mebittersweet,irresistible,a crawling beast.Sappho, “fragment 15”Or,  Five Times A Demon Was The Poetess's Muse
Relationships: Crowley/Sappho (Historical RPF)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	Crawling Beast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [parcequelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/parcequelle/gifts).

**fragment 23, apple**

“Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough...” Sappho declaimed, pacing proudly through the public gardens of the city of Mytilene, in Lesbos, on a crisp spring morning. A long, lean shadow fell across her vision, darkening her sight. “Atop, on the topmost twig -”

“Hey,” said the shadow.

“On the _topmost_ twig, which the pluckers forgot… somehow…”

Crawley covered the rich red hair pinned and netted in luscious curls around her head with long-fingered, bony hands.

“Forgot? No -”

“That’s pretty rich, coming from someone as short as you, you… short person,” the demon stuttered. Sappho snickered, looking up at her friend’s elaborate coiffure and aquiline nose. “Look at you,” Crawley said, waving her hands over the young poet’s dark head, “no taller than a sparrow.”

“Forgot, no, but got it not -” Sappho continued.

“Oh, that’s it,” said Crawley, and bent and wrapped her bony arms around Sappho’s soft waist and, lifting, plumped them both down in the soft grass. Giggling, Sappho tugged one of the twisted red curls down.

The demon squawked. “I just got that done this morning! Do you know how hard it is to get an appointment with my favourite hairdresser? _Bless -”_

Sappho twisted over her, and kissed Crawley on the mouth.

“We’re the same height, now,” she purred.

“Ngk,” said Crawley, yellow eyes very wide..

**

**fragment 22, weave**

In the hot baking heat of summer, the demon Crawley flopped back into the grass. “Sweet Mother, I cannot weave,” she announced, looking up at the sky and gesturing dramatically. The sky, hackled in cloud and blue, said nothing. “I’m overcome. There’s just this sweetest girl…”

“Hmm, I like that. Think I’ll use it,” Sappho said, sitting up and reaching for her wax diptych.

“Hey!” squawked the demon.

**

**31, my tongue is frozen in silence**

“So, um,” said Crawley, sitting on a stone bench and looking out over the garden, “I’ve a friend coming to visit. You’ll like hi-, he-, you’ll like my friend, I’m sure of it.”

“We’ve been together for years,” said Sappho neutrally, “and you haven’t spoken of this friend before.”

Even on this crisp autumn day, there were flocks of women and girls walking along the paths among the flowers and ornamental bushes. Many had wax tablets of their own in their soft hands, or musical instruments, and all were talking animatedly about poetry and story-telling. As each small group passed Sappho’s seat they dropped into brief, respectful courtesies, or even blushed slightly.

“Heh,” said Crawley, “they delight in you.”

“I suppose.” Sappho kicked her short legs on the side of her seat. Her hand curved around the gentle swell of her belly.

“You’re not jealous, are you?”

“Phht. Did you mind when I got married?”

“I sure enjoyed helping you get rid of… Dick.”

“I’m not jealous, just surprised is all.”

“I’ve never found feelings do things in a reasonable way,” Crawley answered soberly. Then, ducking away from The Feelings with unseemly alacrity, she said, “So my friend, loves books, piles of them all up in their arms, they’ll _adore_ y-”

She stopped as they passed the entrance to the public garden, where a woman with hair as fluffy and white as a well-tended lamb looked around the clustered poets, half eager and half anxious. She clasped plump, soft hands in front of her, almost lost in the elaborate folds of her Ionian chiton. “Aziraphale’s early,” Crawley said, tongue freezing in her mouth. A delicate blush flamed lightly in her cheeks, and - “With company.”

Behind the lamb woman, a tall man stepped up, with broad shoulders and a strong, officiously handsome face. He was dressed in the height of fashion, the folds of his own chiton arranged with exacting precision. His violet eyes held bewilderment as to why the pair of them were frittering away their time here, and he put one extremely familiar hand on the woman's round shoulder.

Sappho glanced at her lover, and saw Crawley frozen still, and when Sappho took her hand it was trembling and icy with sweat.

“Hide me,” the demon said suddenly, and transformed into a dainty black snake which slithered immediately into the folds of Sappho’s clothing.

“This is not elegant,” Sappho hissed into the drapes over her bosom.

“‘m always elegant,” Crawley hissed back. “When did you see an inelegant snake? Never, that’s when.”

“You lack class!” she whispered fiercely.

"You smell nice!" the snake hissed back.

Sappho squeaked in indignation, then froze again as the lamb-haired woman and her friend walked closer.

Sappho’s smile broadened. “Welcome to our… gardens,” she told them. “Poetry gardens, yes.”

“Oh, I do love poetry,” the lamb-haired woman said. The large man beside her sighed gustily.

The snake slithered against Sappho’s skin and she jumped. “Yes, we do do a lot of… poetry, here. Very fond.”

The lamb-haired woman beamed.

**

**fragment 19, weeping many tears she left me**

“I don’t… I don’t _want_ to go,” Crawley said awkwardly. She tried to lace her fingers into the Poetess’s, but Sappho clasped her hands together, a grey-haired, proper matron as they walked through the winter-barren garden. “It’s - I have orders. Things are really heating up in Persia.”

“How long will you be gone?” Sappho asked. “Years?”

The demon was silent.

“I know that Lesbos is just a… a holiday for you. And I’m like a pet bird, loved but not…”

The demon stared at her, eyes wide and poison yellow, pupils black slits.

“Just promise we will be remembered when I’m gone.”

“Believe it,” the demon whispered.

**

**fragment 14, Eros, coming from heaven**

It doesn’t end in a garden. On a cliff in Sicily, in a place of exile, a woman walks slowly. She is short, and round, and her hair is the snowy white of advanced age.

She walks alone, watching her shadow cast before her. The wind blows, and the waves below crash, and she is alone.

“Um, hey,” another shadow, sly and sinuous, slithers up beside her own.

“Crawley.” Sappho turns, smiling.

The demon looks as she ever did, long and lean, with her netted hair a flaming, impudent red, her body wrapped in a mantle of richly dyed purple. She smiles uncertainly.

“Still a loosener of limbs, my dear,” says Sappho.

“Oh, you flatterer.” Crawley takes the Poetess’s hand and laces her fingers with her own and they walk a little longer. The wind pulls wild tendrils of hair from both of them, twirling them into snake-curling ringlets with its colourless fingers. “So... you know you’re going to die soon?”

“Oh yes.” Sappho touches her breast with her free hand. “My heart.”

“Hhf, yeah. It’d be quick, I want you to know that. But…” The demon drops her purple cloak and steps backwards for a little way, onto the rocky ground of the very lip of the white cliff and teeters there. “If you trust me,” she says carefully, as elegant wings open out behind her, midnight-iridescent as a crow. “If you trust me -”

“Always,” Sappho says, and steps up to kiss the demon, who yelps and tips backwards, falling, and the grip of her fingers pulls the poetess over, surrounded only by the rushing wind and the arms of a demon. She clings tight for a moment, to feel Crawley’s hammering heartbeat, and then wings open out on Sappho’s own back and she flies on her own, with small brown wings, clever as a sparrow.

They fall together - sooner or later everyone falls. But first they fly.

**Author's Note:**

> // It is, like, really hard to pin down biographical details for Sappho, but a couple of relatively period sources suggest she was dark-complected and quite short.
> 
> // For the poems I used the labelling system of this site: https://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html though I borrowed from several different translations or freely paraphrased. It’s a fanfic, not an academic text.
> 
> // _“I sure enjoyed helping you get rid of… Dick.”_ \- “Sappho was supposedly married to a wealthy merchant named Kerkylos of Andros--a claim that subsequent commentators passed along as an established fact. However, the doubtful nature of this figure's name and origin (Kerklyos from Andros means "Little Prick" from the Island of Man) ...” - https://condor.depaul.edu/dsimpson/tlove/sappho2.html
> 
> // One hesitates to speculate outside the story, but I suspect that after this last pleasure jaunt Sappho apotheosised in some way and ended up as the patron spirit of the loving and extremely dramatic. (We all need someone in our corner.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Crawling Beast](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26523766) by [carboncopies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carboncopies/pseuds/carboncopies), [elaineofshalott (LadyofMisrule)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyofMisrule/pseuds/elaineofshalott), [secretsofluftnarp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretsofluftnarp/pseuds/secretsofluftnarp)


End file.
